Can Huck hang on?

DES MOINES — Since becoming the Iowa front-runner, Mike Huckabee has been subjected to a month-long siege of media scrutiny and mostly unanswered attacks from his top rival — an onslaught that any presidential hopeful would be hard-pressed to survive.

Huckabee has found himself under the unforgiving glare of the front-runner’s spotlight, and his hopes to win here have now become severely threatened by it.

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Although Huckabee remains in the lead in most public polling — and the GOP race is so fluid as to make predictions suicidal — Politico has learned that Mitt Romney’s latest internal polling shows the former Massachusetts governor has narrowed the gap significantly and is now in a virtual tie with Huckabee.

Huckabee’s slide can be explained by a series of inter-related factors. His rise came right as the media began to closely cover the campaign, he and his undermanned campaign organization have been ill-prepared to push back against broadsides from both the media and Romney, and his positions and rhetoric have drawn the enmity of a constellation of groups within the conservative establishment.

In many ways, Huckabee is having to wage the same fight against conservatives that John McCain did in 2000 while simultaneously running in the sort of hostile media environment that hamstrung John Kerry in 2004.

And he’s doing so without the experience in dealing with the national press corps that McCain had and with a shadow of the sort of all-star communications team that Kerry had in the trenches with him.

To make matters worse, as Huckabee’s challenges have grown more intense of late, he has lost the aide he brought on to handle his rapid-response and research operation.

Joe Carter, who took a leave from the Family Research Council to move down to the former Arkansas governor’s campaign headquarters in Little Rock, has returned to Washington, leaving a key position unfilled in the crucial final days before the caucuses.

With Carter gone — his last e-mail to reporters was Dec. 17 — Huckabee has been largely responding to every new story or attack that emerges himself, at times compounding the problem.

Battered in recent days over a variety of issues, including his unfounded assertion that Pakistanis make up the largest number of non-Hispanic immigrants coming over America’s southern border, Huckabee appeared on NBC’s “Today” show Saturday and tried to dismiss his critics rather than explain a series of questionable statements.

“People are looking for a president who isn’t perfect, but who has at least a sense of direction in his own life and has clear and unmistakable ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong,” Huckabee said.

Huckabee, of course, was trying to draw a contrast between his own gaffes and the rightward policy shifts of Romney.

But after months of close-up examinations of Romney’s newly conservative views, it has been Huckabee’s record and rhetorical hiccups that have drawn most of the attention for the past month.

It has been a devastating bill of particulars.

Huckabee has undergone scrutiny for his ethical transgressions in Arkansas, his support for the pardon of an Arkansas sex offender who committed murder after being released from prison, his 1992 statement that AIDS victims should be quarantined, his decision to continue to draw a salary from a nonprofit financed in part by tobacco money and his policy of taking speaking fees from controversial groups prior to his campaign.

Then there have been self-inflicted wounds like his Pakistan comments, his wondering out loud to The New York Times magazine whether Mormons believe Jesus and the devil are brothers, his description of the Bush administration’s foreign policy in Foreign Affairs as one of an “arrogant bunker mentality,” his unfamiliarity with the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program and his assertion that he was receiving foreign policy advice from people who said they had never spoken with him.

Asked whether they had been prepared for the level of scrutiny that has come their way, campaign manager Chip Saltsman said with a laugh: “I don’t think anybody is ready for that.”